Locked-in Syndrome of Age & Experience

I had to study Les Murray at matriculation for English HSC (the grading names have all been change to protect the past), via The Vernacular Republic, only a couple of years after it was published. I didn’t have to fail it, but I am glad I did (probably due to my handwriting speed in essaywriting). #themoth

LES MURRAY: I’m a subhuman redneck, of course I am.

MARK COLVIN: Is that because of the bullying?

LES MURRAY: There I suppose probably, yeah. You know that deep down the university, university English departments are never going to take me seriously because they are in the business of training kids to be members of the middle class.

I was sent to university to become part of the middle class, I did not do it, I did something else, I became a poet and I’ve never been forgiven for it.

MARK COLVIN: But that sounds extraordinarily resentful given than that people like the great writer Joseph Brodsky says, “He is quite simply the one by whom the language lives,” and then somebody, John Timpany, in the Philadelphia Inquirer says, “Would somebody please, please give this guy the Nobel prize?”

LES MURRAY: Yeah I don’t believe any of it. I know where people, people know where they fit in society and you can’t move out of it.

You can play games with it, which is what I do but, you can’t overcome it or dismiss it. You are assigned that part of society and the fires of hell will not move you.